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Home / Politics & Society / Professional Development for Teachers / Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling / What is the research behind the migration data set?

What is the research behind the migration data set?

Watch Professor Heaven Crawley introduce the MEDMIG data set.
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1
(light music)
7.1
<v ->So this is data about people,</v> people who move and those people come from different places. They have different backgrounds. They’re men, they’re women with children, without children, and they have different experiences. So this data captures those experiences in a numeric way. We ask them questions, and we can give you quantified numeric data about people. Each data line is a human being. And it tells you something about that human being. And when you see all those data lines, all those human beings in the round, you can start to see patterns and you can start to see differences. That’s what this data set does.
48.5
<v ->So we’ve produced learning resources that go</v> with the data set that Heaven was talking to you about. They were designed for the use in the key stage three classroom here in the UK, but essentially they could be used in any classroom anywhere where teachers want to support migration teaching with up to date data and research. You can basically adapt the resources to own classroom needs. We’ll be looking at some of the different resources and the concepts in the next two weeks of our FutureLearn course. It’s really important that before you start this project with the students in your classroom, that you take time to look at the data set yourself.
83.6
Because it’s a genuine data set, some of the results can be surprising. For example, one of the respondents said that their migration journey had been 30 years. If you haven’t seen that element of the data before, then it could throw you. However, if you know that it’s there and you’re ready for the conversation, then it can become a really important teaching point. It can show how long and protracted migration journeys can be. For this respondent, they would have migrated to the first country, perhaps work there for some time and then had to move on and then move on again, and then move on again.
117.7
In this way it’s vitally important that you’ve looked at the data and you’ve explored and thought about the anomalies before you start the project with your classes. (uplifting music)

Professor Heaven Crawley is the Director of MIDEQ. As you have learned from our team of MIDEQ researchers, MIDEQ is a current, five-year project running until 2024. The project aims to produce robust, comparative, widely accessible data on South-South migration, inequality and development, and fieldwork and data collection is underway even as it navigates the restrictions and global challenges of COVID-19.

In this course we will show you how you can use data in the classroom to teach both migration. To do so we use a data set from MED MIG. MED MIG was a migration research project led by Professor Heaven Crawley in 2015-2016, looking into the backgrounds, experiences and aspirations of refugees and migrants entering Italy, Greece, Malta and Turkey in that period. In this video, watch Professor Heaven Crawley introduce the MED MIG data set, and the stories behind the numbers.

For further reading about the impact of COVID-19 on migration, inequality and development, read Professor Heaven Crawley’s MIDEQ blog post The Great Amplifier: COVID 19, migration and inequality.**

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This content is taken from SOAS University of London online course
Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling
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Teaching Migration Through Data and Storytelling

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